I opened my work email this morning to find 500 , now over 600, emails had come in over night. It appears somebody sent an email out to a large mailing list in work, and people keep using reply all requesting to be taken off the mailing list.

Whenever I get stuff like that I just ignore all at the start of the thread

yup or set a rule to bin them.

I always send mails to a lot of people to myself with BCC to everyone else. That way they only see my address as a return address and no-one else's email address.

We had something very similar yesterday. An email with "Create Site" in the subject which went to the whole group - thousands of addresses - and made worse by morons hitting reply to all saying "don't send this to me" or, even better, replying to all and berating other people for replying to all; which was inevitably followed up by another message (sent to everyone) just to tell him he replied to everyone!

Could be worse, you could be at Cisco
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/19 ... man_hours/

But seriously, who is creating all these distribution groups without locking down the permitted senders? That's begging for punishment.